Some Thoughts on Beauty

It feels like I've been gone so long! I blogged on the first day of last week, and now almost the last day of this week, so I apologize for my absence. I have been reading your posts when notification comes to my inbox and I'm super impressed that you are still going strong.

I passed on the group challenge last week, thank you NYC for the amazing treats of delectable goodness. I would like to report that I did keep to my personal goal of one treat a day, except for one day. I was AWESOME! And the cookies, donuts, cheesecake, drinking chocolate, and frozen custard were delicious.

I am having a vacation hangover, but I have loved the group challenge this week. It worked out really well because the friend I normally do Insanity with bought a new workout system called Peak 10. You can learn more about it here. We did two different workouts Monday and Wednesday and it pretty much kicked my butt. He learned about it from a friend who had checked them out from the library and they both decided they liked it enough to buy it. I really like it. It's kind of a combination of Insanity and Billy Blanks and P90X. It's complicated enough to keep your mind occupied, but not so complicated that you can't keep up. Well, except for the end of the last repetition circuit, then I have a hard time keeping up.

So if you want to use that lovely idea to find out what workouts you enjoy, it's a good one. Check them out from the library (or borrow them from Sariah) then decide if you want to invest.

Anyhoo, I have had some other thoughts this week as well. Just regarding health and fitness goals. It's great to have goals you're working toward, but try not to get down on yourself. Love your body and all that it can do.

This isn't coming out of nowhere.
My mom came to take care of my kids while the hubby and I were away, blessed woman! She took me shopping the day after I came home so I could get a few new things to wear for spring. She kept saying, "Everything looks great on you because you're so fit. You've been working so hard! Good for you!" Well let me just tell ya, I felt like a million bucks with her praise, trying on all sorts of pants and shirts and having them look good. And then just a couple days later I am at Zumba, and comparing myself to some of the ladies there who must have 10% less body fat than me and I start to think, "If I could give up the treats and do another cleanse and workout longer or more effectively or more often, then I bet I could get abs like that. I bet my butt wouldn't jiggle so much, blah, blah, blah," (you get the picture). Today I told myself to snap out of it! Because in those moments I am the kind of person I DO NOT want to be. Someone who's never satisfied. Someone who compares herself to others and gets discouraged. Someone that short changes the work she's done and the person she is. LAME! So I am snapping out of it. I work hard within the restraints that my life creates. So I am going to celebrate that!

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland (for those of you gals who  aren't Mormons, he is one of the international leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and boy do I love this man! He has a way of telling it like it is that makes you feel better instead of worse!) has said, "I plead with you . . .women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different. Some are tall, and some are short. Some are round, and some are thin. And almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not!. . . We should all be as fit as we can be—that’s good Word of Wisdom doctrine. That means eating right and exercising and helping our bodies function at their optimum strength. We could probably all do better in that regard. But I speak here of optimum health; there is no universal optimum size.

Frankly, the world has been brutal with you in this regard. You are bombarded in movies, television, fashion magazines, and advertisements with the message that looks are everything! The pitch is, “If your looks are good enough, your life will be glamorous and you will be happy and popular.” That kind of pressure is immense in the teenage years, to say nothing of later womanhood. In too many cases too much is being done to the human body to meet just such a fictional (to say nothing of superficial) standard. As one Hollywood actress is reported to have said recently: “We’ve become obsessed with beauty and the fountain of youth. … I’m really saddened by the way women mutilate [themselves] in search of that. I see women [including young women] … pulling this up and tucking that back. It’s like a slippery slope. [You can’t get off of it.] … It’s really insane … what society is doing to women.” ¹⁰

In terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women, including young women, face in the modern world. And if adults are preoccupied with appearance—tucking and nipping and implanting and remodeling everything that can be remodeled—those pressures and anxieties will certainly seep through to children. At some point the problem becomes what the Book of Mormon called “vain imaginations.” ¹¹ And in secular society both vanity and imagination run wild. One would truly need a great and spacious makeup kit to compete with beauty as portrayed in media all around us. Yet at the end of the day there would still be those “in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers” as Lehi saw, ¹² because however much one tries in the world of glamour and fashion, it will never be glamorous enough.

A woman not of our faith once wrote something to the effect that in her years of working with beautiful women she had seen several things they all had in common, and not one of them had anything to do with sizes and shapes. She said the loveliest women she had known had a glow of health, a warm personality, a love of learning, stability of character, and integrity." (If you want to read this whole address, go here.)

So I'll leave it at that for now. We are wonderful, beautiful women! Keep up the good work to try and attain that optimum health and stop worrying about optimum size. Be happy!